The purpose of a field information management system, or FIMS, is to store information relating to fieldwork (e.g. specimen records, collecting events, identification, etc.) The FIMS being used for the BWP is the Biocode FIMS, which is being developed by the Biological Science Collections (BiSciCol) project. The BWP is using a cloud-hosted version that is available at http://biscicol.org. All that you need to use the Biocode FIMS is a spreadsheet program (Excel, Google Sheets, etc.), and a browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The BWP uses the Geneious molecular biology software package to run the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) portion of the project, and for assembly of sequences and submission to GenBank. Geneious is a cross-platform (works equally well on Windows, Mac, and Linux) program that provides a simple GUI (Graphical User Interface) to many classic molecular biology tools in a layout similar to an e-mail client. Geneious is a commercial software that is not free, but BWP is providing institutional licenses to partner institutions. You can find more information about Geneious at their website: http://www.geneious.com/.